1. Technical Field
This invention is related to building computer systems with natural language understanding and dialog management capabilities, and more particularly to a method and system for context-based dynamic assignment of weights for the user's commands for these systems.
2. Description of Related Art
Natural language understanding (NLU) systems enable computers to understand and extract information from human speech. Such systems may function in a complimentary manner with a variety of other computer applications, such as a speech recognition system, where there exists a need to understand human speech. NLU systems may extract relevant information contained within text and then supply this information to another application program or system to perform a desired task.
Conventional NLU systems typically attempt to translate the user's input to a formal command by searching the whole space of formal language commands, without considering reducing the search space of the translation process. In other words, the translation step is done without considering the prior context of interaction, without using the knowledge of the user's favorite interaction sequences, and without considering the access modality used in the interactions. As users regularly use repeating patterns for repeating tasks, this knowledge may be used to improve accuracy of the natural language understanding, reduce the need for explicit user's disambiguation and thus improve task completion time and increase user satisfaction.
Therefore, it would be beneficial to have a method and apparatus for reducing the search space of the translation process when some context information is available. More particularly, it would be beneficial to have a method and apparatus that dynamically assigns weights to the subset of commands in a natural language dialog system in order to improve the accuracy of the system, decrease task completion time, and resolve command ambiguities without the user's intervention.